


Our minds are troubled by the emptiness

by ElectricBoomerang



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, I have a lot of feelings about episode 66, Magcretia if you wanna interpret it that way, Mostly Magnus and Lucretia bc they're my favorite characters, One (1) interaction that could be interpreted as Davenchurch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-21 23:02:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11367453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElectricBoomerang/pseuds/ElectricBoomerang
Summary: Magnus doesn't remember these four people, but he thinks he cares about them. He tries his best to support Lucretia as she takes everyone home.





	Our minds are troubled by the emptiness

**Author's Note:**

> The title's from the song Youth, by Daughter.
> 
> I was literally sobbing my eyes out after I listened to Episode 66, so I wrote this to cope.
> 
> This is my first TAZ fic so everyone's probably really OoC I'm sorry.

When the man woke up, his first thought wasn’t _where am I?_

It was _who am I?_

He sat up with a groan, pressing his hand to his forehead. His head was pounding, static filling nearly every thought. 

“Oh, you’re awake!” said a woman, who came to sit next to where he was lying on the floor. “Thank the gods.”

She looked like she’d been crying, which made his heart hurt for reasons he didn’t understand. “Who… am I?” he managed to ask.

She looked like she was going to cry again. With a wobbling voice, she took his big hands in hers, and said, “You’re Magnus Burnsides, the Protector. You rush into danger without a second thought, and care about your friends, your family, more than life itself.”

“Magnus Burnsides, the Protector,” he repeated slowly, reaching up to touch his sideburns.

She saw the motion, and smiled a little, fondness filling her eyes. “You always said that you grew those out because of your last name.”

“Who are you?”

Terror flashed across her face for a heartbeat. “An old friend,” she said quickly.

“What’s your name?” he rephrased.

She took a deep breath. “Lucretia.”

“Hail and well met,” he said, trying to give her a reassuring grin. For some reason, he really didn’t want her to cry.

Lucretia laughed bitterly. “We should go check on the others.”

She pulled him to his feet, and his legs wobbled like a newborn calf’s. She led him by the hand to the stairs, and Magnus caught sight of what was beyond them from one of the windows, pure blue sky (that felt wrong for reasons he couldn’t place). “What?”

Lucretia followed his gaze, looking out across the expanse of sky around them. “Oh gods, right. I’ll need to explain that, won’t I?”

He gave her a wide-eyed look, like “please do”.

She sighed. “I will, I promise. We just need to get everyone together first.”

Once they reached the deck of the ship, she led Magnus to sit with three others, a dwarf, an elf, and a gnome, all wearing the same crimson jacket as Magnus and Lucretia, confusion and hurt written across their faces.

Magnus waved a hand at them, “Hail and well met! I’m Magnus Burnsides,” he grinned, then gave Lucretia a questioning glance, checking that he had gotten the name right.

She nodded, and moved to the controls of the skyship, looking things over, and leaving Magnus with the others. 

“I’m Merle,” said the dwarf, who was sitting with the gnome man on his right, Magnus on his left, while the elf was to Magnus’s left.

“I’m Davenport,” the gnome said forcefully, as if they might not believe him. As if he might not believe himself.

“I’m Taako, from TV,” the elf said flippantly, and then confusion crossed his face for a moment, as if he wasn’t sure why he’d said that, but he erased it from his expression quickly. “Also I think I might’ve killed a dude, so there’s that.”

“What?” Magnus barked out a disbelieving laugh. 

Taako shrugged. “He was freaking out about something, and told me to blast him off this ship or whatever. So I did.”

“That's... not cool,” Merle informed him.

“Davenport,” Davenport attempted, looking disappointed. Whether Davenport was disappointed in Taako for killing that guy, or in himself for saying his own name, he wasn’t sure. “Davenport,” he tried again, frustrated. Magnus was starting to think that was all he could say. “Davenport!”

Merle put a reassuring arm around his shoulders. “It’s okay, we get what you’re saying. Taako shouldn’t have done that.”

“In my defense, he told me to.”

“Whatever, nevermind,” Magnus said, trying to calm everyone down. He didn’t like seeing them worked up over this, but he wasn’t sure why he cared so much. They felt familiar, like he had known them for lifetimes. Magnus thought they all reminded him of a broken puzzle, with missing pieces, and the remaining ones all bent out of shape so they wouldn’t fit together quite right anymore.

Finally Lucretia came back to the group again. “I’m Lucretia, and I’ve been taking care of you four for the past year or so,” she said, and Magnus realized that her voice was steady again, like she had finally sorted out her nerves. He was proud of her. “You were all very sick, so you were sent up here, with me, but everyone’s better now, so I can finally take you… home,” she hesitated on the last word, as if it didn’t sound right to her. “You can go back to your families,” she sighed, not making direct eye contact.

 

Merle got to go back home first, on a beautiful beach. Lucretia looked wistful as she piloted the ship away, her eyes trained carefully on the horizon. 

“You okay?” Magnus asked quietly.

“Just… thinking,” she said, not looking at him.

“About what?”

“I’d tell you, but you physically could not understand what I’m saying,” she said bitterly.

“I’ll try anyways,” Magnus pressed. “If you want to talk to somebody.”

Lucretia sighed, and then she finally looked at him, and Magnus realized her mouth was moving, but all he could hear was static.

“O- _kay_ ,” Magnus said unsteadily. The static made his head hurt, like his brain was trying to understand information that simply didn’t exist. Like phantom pains for limbs, except instead of a missing arm, it was missing memories.

“I told you.”

“And I said that I’d try,” he reminded her.

She gave him a small smile, and turned her eyes back to the sky beyond the ship.

 

When Taako went back home, Lucretia was muttering stuff under her breath, that Magnus couldn’t quite hear as he approached her.

“What?” he asked.

“It’s what he wanted. He can finally be ‘Taako, from TV’ again,” Lucretia told him.

Magnus nodded. “Anyways, I found some scrap wood in one of the rooms nobody used while me, Davenport, and Taako were exploring, so I made something? I thought I’d give it to you?” he explained, handing her a wooden duck. Carving it had come naturally to him, and he thought it’d turned out pretty nicely. 

Lucretia held it gingerly, as if she was afraid it might explode. She looked like she might cry again.

“Oh, um, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to keep it!” Magnus said quickly. 

Lucretia immediately shook her head. “I’m keeping it.”

 

Finally, it was Magnus’s turn to go home. She led him by the hand into a woodworking studio, in a town apparently called Raven’s Roost. It was amazing, with plenty of wide open space, and filled with every tool he might ever use. “I love it, thank you!” Magnus said excitedly.

Lucretia smiled at him, a fond look in her eyes. After a moment, she turned to walk away.

“Wait!” Magnus grabbed her arm before she could leave. “You’ve been so kind to the four of us, thank you. And I wish I could remember more of the time that we spent together.”

There was a fragile look on Lucretia’s face. “Me, too,” she said quietly, and Magnus let her leave.

“Come visit soon!” Magnus called after her.

 

After that, Magnus couldn’t quite remember who told him “You’re Magnus Burnsides, the Protector,” while holding onto his hands like a lifeline. Maybe his mother, or his older sister, but he tried to live up to what she'd said. He tried his best to protect the weak, and the people he cared about. He’d fight until his last breath for them.

He hoped that wherever that woman was, she was proud of him.

(She was.)


End file.
